Minecraft snapshot 14w10a expunges poltergeists from spectator mode

Work at Mojang continues apace on rewrites of Minecraft’s inventory, block state concepting and block model formatting systems, all in the name of a robust plugin API. The fruits of that haven’t emerged yet, but the dev team have found time to squeeze off a few bugfixes - chiefly for the new spectator mode - and to get the game shipshape for player name changes.

“Don’t worry, we have some cool survival plans soon!”, wrote Dinnerbone.

In the tentative new spectator mode, there’ve been all sorts of ghostly happenings going on. Players could throw items picked up before entering spectator mode onto pressure plates and avoid the consequences. What’s more, armour remained visible as disembodied chestplates drifting about the map, and mobs were able to follow spectator players about - despite their ethereal status. All of that's now been fixed.

Elsewhere in this test update, all the server files related to player names have automatically been changed to UUIDs - unique identifiers that prevent similar usernames from being confused in the same database.

That’ll mean two things: first, that third party tools linked to player names will cease functioning and need to be updated. And second, that name changes are now “technically supported”.

“Though names changes are technically supported in this snapshot, they will not be available until after 1.8 releases when we will be confident that the majority of active servers have updated to support UUIDs,” explained Dinnerbone.

Mojang will release a 1.7.6 patch soon to backport the UUID changes for normal servers.

See Dinnerbone’s post for the rest of the changelog. To take advantage of the new snapshot, you’ll need to follow the usual procedure: open your launcher, create a new profile named ‘snapshots’, and tick the box to enable experimental updates. You can switch back to safe, vanilla Minecraft at any time via the dropdown profile box.